diacritical marks update?

Robert Jacobs
Dear site administrators:

I was wondering if Zotero could use diacritical marks yet. I saw alot of discussion over a year ago in other posts, but very little resolution.

Is there now an update that allows this. I usually use worldcat for my Arabic sources transliterated into English (which has the marks), but they dont translate to Zotero (they just have a diamond with a question mark in them.)

If the answer is already on a discussion and I missed it (or couldnt understand it) please point me in the right direction.

Thanks,
Rob J.
  • dstillman
    Could you provide some URLs or sample searches that don't work correctly?
  • Robert Jacobs
    Sure. I looked up an author named Muhammad Qutb in WorldCat. I found the book I was looking for called "Shubuhat Hawla al-Islam" (Islam, the Misunderstood Religion, I left out the diacritical marks on the name in this post).

    On worldCat the entry looks perfect, it has all the lines above vowels and dots under letters that I need. When I try to put that into my Zotero library, the title has none of the diacriticials, and adds a diamond with a question mark in the center several times to the name of the book and author.

    I also tried the same thing from the Princeton Univ. Library and had a similar result, except that the title and author came out in my library as jibberish instead.

    Thanks,
    Rob J.
  • rs123
    I see the problem when i export refs. So, for instance,

    Viso-León becomes Viso-Le√≥n in Refer/BibIX, or, interestingly,
    Viso-Le{\'o}n in BibTeX.

    I love the Zotero concept, but these diacritic problems were discussed a year ago on several forum threads. Still an issue.
  • noksagt
    The refer/bibix export gives the correct UTF-8 symbol for me, but some programs may expect a different encoding.

    What problems do you have with the BibTeX's use of LaTeX entity? Not all BibTeX/LaTeX systems support UTF-8 at all & there is not really a system that has full support for it.

    However, Zotero can export UTF-8 BibTeX if you prefer.
  • dstillman
    The latest 1.0 dev build supports UTF-8 in Refer/BibIX and exports "Viso-León" correctly. This Unicode support will be available in 1.0.8.

    "Viso-Le{\'o}n" is a correct BibTeX representation of "Viso-León". (In the latest version of the BibTeX translator this has been changed to "Viso-Le\'{o}n".)

    So these are not still issues. Robert's problem above is an unrelated issue.
  • dstillman
    edited November 7, 2008
    Robert: WorldCat doesn't provide the accented characters in the linked RIS file, which is what Zotero uses to retrieve the metadata.

    As for Princeton, I didn't code our MARC support, but I don't believe Zotero fully supports the MARC-8 (non-Unicode) character set, and Princeton's Voyager catalog is serving the raw MARC-8 record. (Since Firefox doesn't support the MARC-8 charset, support for it would presumably have to be implemented manually from the raw data, which would be no small feat.) Zotero should import extended characters properly from library catalogs that provide Unicode MARC data.
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